Muscle/Break

Taking a break, taking five minutes, taking melatonin, your recommendations.

The Rundown

Muscle/Break. While consistency is the focus of most strength training plans, new research suggests that taking an extended break may not set you back as much as you think. A study from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland found that even with a 10-week break in weight training, it took people a short amount of time to get back to where they left off.

For the study, one group of 22 participants worked out twice a week for 20 continuous weeks. A second group of 22 people performed the same routine, which focused on muscle strength and size, for 10 weeks, then stopped and returned at the 20-week mark for a further 10 weeks. The participants’ ages ranged from late twenties to mid-thirties and they were physically active but had never done any type of long-term resistance training.

The researchers found that muscle size declined in the “gym holiday” group but strength did not go down as much as expected and it only took a few weeks to get back to where they were before their time off.

Study co-author Eeli Halonen says that during the first few weeks after the break, the participants’ progress was quick and after five weeks of re-training, they reached their pre-break level.

Notably, the people who trained continuously for 20 weeks experienced a slump in gains after the first 10 weeks.

Maximum strength declined at a much slower rate than expected. For Halonen, this could be explained “by the fact that changes in the nervous system may be more permanent than peripheral changes in the muscles.”

More work needs to be done on the dynamics of muscle memory at a cellular and molecular level, but the study is good news if you’re worried that an injury, holiday or illness might mean starting from scratch after your time away.

Five Minutes for Heart Health. Taking five minutes a day to get your heart rate up could help reduce your blood pressure. A team of researchers led by the University of Sydney and University College London found that moving every day, even for just five minutes, could help lower both systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP).

For the study, 14,761 people from five countries wore a thigh accelerometer to measure their activity and blood pressure throughout the day and night. Day activities were put into six categories: sleep, sitting, slow walking, fast walking, standing and more intense exercise, like running, cycling or climbing stairs.

Gathering the data, the team looked at how replacing one of the six behaviors for another could measurably impact blood pressure. As expected, replacing sedentary behavior with more vigorous exercise had the largest benefits but the surprise was the time spent doing the activity.

While clinically significant changes in blood pressure happened from 20-27 minutes of additional exercise (about 2 mm Hg for SBP and 1 mm Hg for DBP), it took only five minutes per day to shift the reading (around 0.68 mm Hg for SBP and 0.54 mm Hg for DBP).

First author Dr. Jo Blodgett sums up the study’s findings, “The good news is that whatever your physical ability, it doesn’t take long to have a positive effect on blood pressure. What’s unique about our exercise variable is that it includes all exercise-like activities, from running for a bus or a short cycling errand, many of which can be integrated into daily routines.”

Dr. Blodgett also notes that walking has some positive benefits for blood pressure for people who don’t do a lot of exercise. However, if you want to change your blood pressure, you need to put more demand on your cardiovascular system—walking up a steep hill, for example.

In the six categories that the researchers based their modeling on, sleep was also shown to have a positive impact on blood pressure but you would need to reallocate a substantial amount of time from sedentary activity to sleep (two hours and 50 minutes for SBP and one hour and 46 minutes for DBP).

Sleep & Melatonin. What is the optimal dosage and best time to take melatonin to improve sleep? A recent paper has some answers.

But first, a primer. Melatonin is a hormone made by the body’s pineal gland that helps regulate our circadian rhythms, or the natural patterns the body experiences in a 24-hour cycle. Shortly after the sun sets, it begins to build. It peaks near dawn and then declines during daylight hours. As melatonin floods the brain, it creates a sense of relaxation, working on receptors that begin to prepare us for a good night’s sleep. The catch is we only produce small amounts of the hormone, which has led people to boost the body’s supplies with over-the-counter supplements to help deal with sleep problems.

A group of researchers from Italy, Sweden and the UK collaborated to review the existing scientific work on the efficacy of melatonin supplementation. Their results are based on randomized placebo-controlled trials (the most accurate experimental design in medical research).

The team looked at 1,689 observations from studies performed between 1987 and 2020. They concluded that taking 4 mg of melatonin three hours before bedtime maximized the sleep-inducing effects of the hormone. The current clinical recommendations are 2 mg 30 minutes before bed.

One thing to consider is that there are few hard-and-fast studies of melatonin’s overall efficacy. Scientific literature points to melatonin supplementation working well for some individuals and not much more than a placebo for others. At least one study showed that supplementing melatonin significantly improved overall sleep quality.

Extra Point

Watch

Pulisic. This docuseries goes behind-the-scenes with American soccer player Christian Pulisic. It chronicles his start in Hershey, Pennsylvania, his growing celebrity in Italy as he competes in UEFA Champions League and Serie A competitions and perhaps the highlight of his career, preparing to represent the U.S. Men’s National Team at the 2026 FIFA World Cup on home soil. The first episode of Pulisic debuts on Paramount+ on December 9, with episodes two and three premiering in January. Subsequent seasons will air later in 2025.

Listen

The Bag Game. This award-winning 30 for 30 podcast tells the story of the biggest pay-to-play scandal in the history of college basketball. Based on more than five years of reporting with ESPN’s Mark Schlabach, the series unravels the complex 2018 federal court case. It also features investigative reporter Paula Lavigne who talks to Billy Preston, the recruit at the center of the scandal and his mother, Nichole Player, who allegedly took money from an Adidas representative with ties to University of Kansas coach Bill Self.

Read

A Ridiculous, Perfect Way to Make Friends. I typically don’t put paywalled articles here but I’m including this piece by fellow Substacker Mikala Jamison because her central point is worth sharing. Reflecting on her time as a spin instructor, she writes that “group fitness classes are the best place to make friends as an adult—an idea supported by research that suggests that the glow of exercise’s feel-good chemicals has interpersonal benefits.”